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hogtown-socialist-alternative · 5 years ago

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Can the Working Class Change Society? Socialists Say Yes

By Tom Crean -September 10, 2018

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution and 50 years after the revolutionary general strike in France in 1968, many on the left question whether the working class has a central role in changing society. This is understandable given the enormous retreat of the labor movement in recent decades. Working people in the U.S. [see the companion piece “The American Working Class“] no longer look to the unions as the leading force in the struggle for a better life as they did in the 1930s and 1940s and to a degree after World War II. Also the U.S. is virtually alone among Western countries in having no historical experience of a mass working-class political party which challenges for control of the government.

For a Self-Aware Working Class

Karl Marx, the pioneer of scientific socialism, in describing the modern working-class, differentiated between it being a “class in itself” as opposed to a “class for itself.” The working class, defined as those who have to sell their ability to work to the employer class to survive, has enormous potential social power because of its ability to stop the wheels of the economy. As the accompanying piece explains, contrary to those who say that globalization or automation have eliminated the American working class, it remains without doubt the majority of society. While the capitalist media is at pains to obscure this, just-in-time production, logistics hubs, and other large concentrations of workers, like in airports, show that the big corporations are vulnerable to collective action.

But the key issue is whether the working class moves from being an objective reality, a “class in itself” to being a force that sees its interests as counterposed to those of the capitalists and organizes to challenge their power. Since the Great Recession, working people in the U.S. have become keenly aware that the top 1% and even the top .01% have gained disproportionately while the bottom 99% and especially the bottom 50% are sliding backwards.

Progressives often point to how the tax system has increasingly favored the rich. This is absolutely true but there is a deeper reality: Massive gains in productivity have been made by American workers, yet their wages have barely risen while profits have skyrocketed. The bosses have been winning a one-sided class war. It has recently been reported that even with virtual “full employment” wages in the U.S. are not keeping pace with inflation. This reflects the lack of an organized challenge to the bosses’ power in the workplace.

A Grim Future

There is massive anger at social inequality and the social crisis which faces large sections of the working class. There is a loss of faith in institutions and especially in the political establishment. There is a growing awareness that the future under capitalism promises endless inequality, automation replacing good jobs, and a developing climate catastrophe. In poor countries, wars, famines, and massive displacement of people are likely to intensify. Capitalism no longer pretends to offer a vision of a more abundant future for ordinary people.

The growing anger of working people and young people was reflected in the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders who called for a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” It is also reflected in the massive interest in socialism, especially among young people. This is continuing with the wave of “democratic socialist” candidates including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But in the absence of a political force that clearly represents the interests of the working class, the door was opened to the right populism of Donald Trump who also attacked “free trade” deals and proclaimed himself a champion of the working class. This has led to a dangerously reactionary regime which threatens to destroy any remaining gains made through past struggles by workers, women, and African Americans.

But until recently, working class revolt was only expressed in a partial way and largely on the electoral plane. The retreat of organized labor continued – less than 7% of private sector workers are now in a union and strikes at historically low levels. The recent Janus decision by the Supreme Court aims to drastically undermine organization in the public sector where union density remains higher.

This is why the revolt of teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina is so important. Now there is the potential for a major fight by the key UPS workforce against a rotten contract. There are important organizing drives among airport workers. In Missouri, voters defeated an anti-labor “right-to-work” law brought in by the Republicans by a two-to-one margin. In Europe, Amazon warehouse workers in three countries went on strike in July which could inspire workers in logistics here. These are the signs of a desire to fight. What is desperately needed is leadership and a new direction away from the failed approach of labor leaders of the past 30 years – refusal to use militant tactics or to assert labor’s independent political interests.

Lessons of History

The American working class has a rich tradition of struggle over the past 150 years. In the 1930s and ‘40s, powerful multiracial industrial unions were built using bold tactics including local general strikes and workplace occupations (“sitdown” strikes). Black workers were the driving force of the civil rights movement which brought down Jim Crow in the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Working-class women were the driving force in changing chauvinist attitudes in the ‘60s and ‘70s as part of massive rank and file labor upsurge.

And yet working people in the U.S. never had a true mass political party that expressed their interests. The absence of this helps explain why our pension and heath care system is so much worse than most advanced capitalist countries where there were powerful social democratic and labor parties. Recent commentary in various mainstream publications asks why socialism was not stronger in the U.S. in the past although some have correctly pointed out that socialists have played a major role in the labor movement at all the key points when it has been moving forward.

There are many arguments for why the U.S. is allegedly “exceptional.” Seth Ackerman, an editor at the widely-read left magazine Jacobin, has argued that at the end of the 19th century the U.S. moved on a different course than other capitalist “democracies,” placing onerous restrictions on the development of third parties. The two main (corporate dominated) parties were institutionalized and Ackerman concludes that “the United States [like the Soviet Union] is also a party-state, except instead of being a single-party state, it’s a two-party state. That is just as much of a departure from the norm in the world as a one-party state,”(“A New Party of A New Type,” Jacobinmag.com).

There are elements of truth in Ackerman’s analysis but it is missing an underlying historical reality. Despite all the obstacles, it was hardly inevitable that a workers party would not be created in the U.S. This could have been achieved in the ‘30s and ‘40s for example but was blocked by key labor leaders – unfortunately with assistance from sections of the left, particularly the Communist Party.

The broader truth is that the obstacles to creating a workers party in the past were not primarily legal but lay in the strength of U.S. capitalism which was increasingly dominant in the 20th century on a world scale. The capitalists were able to concede a higher standard of living for a period but they also made relentless use of racism and nativism to keep the working class divided. But again the rise of the CIO industrial unions in the ‘30s proved that common struggle could begin to overcome profound divisions.

Compared to the postwar boom or even the neoliberal era which began in the late 1970s, the situation today is very different. It is very clear that U.S. capitalism is in decline on a global scale. Restoring the previous position through trade wars or other means is an illusion. The workforce is more diverse and integrated than ever before and, despite all the differences in lived experience, there is a burning need for collective struggle to push back the relentless regime of workplace exploitation and the immiseration of wider and wider sections. When 40% of adults don’t know how they would pay for a $400 emergency while the billionaires’ banks accounts grow ever fatter – it’s time to fight back.

Can a new party representing these common class interests be built? Bernie Sanders raised over $200 million with no corporate money – which all pundits said was impossible – and was only defeated because of a rigged primary. Most progressive workers and young people today continue to pursue the idea of reforming the Democratic Party. As working-class struggle reemerges in a more developed way, the need to for political independence will become clearer and the need for a program that challenges capitalism itself and points towards democratic socialism. This will truly be the emergence of a working class “for itself” in America.

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writemarcus · 8 years ago

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Howard Fineman :Global Editorial Director, The Huffington Post

This piece is part of a series on Obama’s legacy that The Huffington Post has been publishing over the past week.

WASHINGTON ― When I first met Barack Obama, in January 2005, he had just arrived in the U.S. Senate. He was 43 years old, but looked 33. A Sinatra-like black suit hung loosely over his lanky frame, and he flashed an enormous smile that lit up the Capitol hallways.

He had “president” written all over him and everyone in the place knew it, most of all ― and quite evidently ― Obama himself. He was a class act, and he knew that, too, and was determined to maintain his dignity. That sounds like a small thing but it was and is not, in a society full of noise, stupidity and accusation.

His had risen fast, but not via lots of elections or by passing lots of legislation, or detailed agendas and platforms. He had done it through eloquent language largely about himself.

His story and lively presence were his own proof of the healing virtues of American struggle and hope. He told all of this in a precocious autobiography published in 1995, and in an electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Now, newly elected and arriving from Illinois, he was a magnet for senators and even reporters, who sidled up to him for photo ops.

I was one of them. “I know who you are,” he said genially. “I read you, I watch you. Come on over to the office once I get things set up.”

Later, I did. His sunny Hart Building office vividly displayed the unique, ambitious and fantastically salable persona he had on offer to the Democratic Party and the country: paintings and portraits of Muhammad Ali, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois cornfield and degrees from Columbia and Harvard on the resume.

He was full of energy, optimism, ideas ― and hope ― in the gloom of the post-9/11 presidency of George W. Bush.

“We have to bring the country together,” he said at one point. “Not red America, or blue America, but America.”

The loud implication: I can do that because I am that beyond-division America. And it was not only plausible but real. He had the temperament to make it happen.

At that very moment, I knew, Obama’s office was the hub of his nascent 2008 presidential campaign, with press secretary Robert Gibbs hard at work from behind lowered blinds and media guru David Axelrod back in Chicago working the phones.

“This is the One,” Axelrod, whom I had known for decades, told me on the phone time after time.

At least as far as winning the presidency, Axelrod turned out to be right.

Now we know how well the Obama Answer worked. The bottom line: moderately well in domestic affairs, less well in the world, in a presidency that is likely to be regarded more as transitional than transformative, and that feels oddly more like the end of an era than the beginning of the one he promised.

The Obama Ledger

First the good news.

Obama’s Mr. Cool persona calmed the roiling markets in 2008, even before he took office. Like a good emergency room surgeon, he did what he had to do stop the bleeding, even if that meant violating perceived Democratic Party orthodoxy.

He gave the big money center banks what they needed. He boldly shored up the auto industry, rightly calculating that, if they failed, they would take the Midwest with them. (No good deed goes unpunished in politics, as the 2016 election showed.) He pushed for as much of a throw-it-against-the-wall stimulus package as he could push through Congress — again, rightly figuring that federal cash was more important than precision. Time was of the essence, and he acted.

Eight years later, all of that is a distant memory. The economic vital signs are strong overall: housing starts, unemployment rates, etc. Widening income and wealth inequality is a global phenomenon, but the American economy as a whole is in decent shape ― and “No Drama Obama” deserves the credit. Even Obamacare, as controversial as it is, has had a stimulative effect by putting money in low-income hands.

The Obama Administration was accused of being too easy on greedy big banks, but it was remarkably free of traditional corruption scandal, even if Republicans tried to make an issue of a few funky energy loans shoveled out as stimulus. Obama ran a clean operation.

Personally, in “This Town,” Obama and his family were seen as rather aloof, keep-to-themselves types. But the reasons in good measure have to do with devotion to family. They liked and needed to be with each other, and who could blame them?

In the face of unimaginable provocation, Obama and his family have acted with grace and class every moment of every day in public. Being president is hard enough; being the first African-American president is a monumental task of social tightrope walking. Obama’s step has been as surefooted as a mountain goat virtually every step of the way along. He slipped at times, but never fell.

The Obamas are devoted parents, and their children have stayed out of trouble as they have grown from little kids to near-adults. This is no small achievement.

The Obamas’ devotion to the arts, to healthy living, to intellectual life in Washington and the country, are worth noting, too ― easy to dismiss as trivial, but only by those who don’t realize just how valuable the role-modeling of a president and first lady can be.

The Obamas have lived a truly multicultural and multiracial public life in Washington, and in the world ― finally (and logically) opening doors to Cuba after 60 years, traveling extensively in Africa. Controversially, Obama even reached out to Iran, not out of naivete, but in hopes of reconnecting with what was once a great civilization and bringing it back into the world conversation.

A tech nerd by nature, Obama largely has left Silicon Valley alone to do what it does. He rode the rise of Facebook to the presidency, and his own experimentation with other forms of social and digital media have been good for what America does best: communicate.

The Drone President

But there is another side to the Obama ledger.

For one, he has enhanced and perfected a theory of distant cyber war that separates the American people from the consequences ― and even the sight of ― the hell we are creating and dealing with elsewhere.

Obama has been the Drone President, cutting back on troop deployments in favor of ultra-targeted drone killings on distant battlefields. Cool can become callous in such circumstances, and there is something chillingly clinical about it all.

He has cracked down in unprecedented ways on leaks in this same time ― but leaks in this new cyber era are the inevitable consequence of the secret, invisible way he has chosen to wage our wars. How else but through WikiLeaks and others is the public to know?

Yet, at the same time, it’s hard to know if the U.S. is winning the cyber wars raging with China, Russia and others. Judging from what happened in the U.S. election, it doesn’t seem like it. Obama’s administration has seemed too easy to penetrate.

In foreign affairs, Obama started with astronomical hope. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 11 days after taking office. He won it that October, four months after he delivered a speech in Cairo advocating outreach to the world of Islam. It seems never to have occurred to him to politely turn it down until he had accomplished something concrete. His acceptance said more than he realized.

And indeed as he leaves office today it is hard to argue that the world in general ― or the Middle East in particular ― are any closer to peace. In fact, the tectonic plates of international affairs are shifting at an accelerating and dangerous pace, and he seems at the mercy of events, not in any way in control of them.

Despite a supposed “pivot” to Asia, China is aggressively asserting itself in the region, including the South China Sea. Russia largely ignored and defied Obama’s modest efforts to rein in Vladimir Putin for grabbing Crimea and the Eastern Ukraine ― and Putin now has President Donald Trump to sanctify it all. NATO and Europe are living in fear of Russian expansionism and threats. And, if anything, Israel and the Palestinians are farther apart than ever on any kind of regional solution. Turkey is rapidly becoming a theocracy, and the theocracy that already exists in the region, in Iran, has not ended its ambition for Cyrus-like dominion just because it signed a nuclear non-proliferation deal.

Leaving Washington Divided

As for the other unbridgeable region in the world ― Washington, D.C. ― it is more divided than ever. It’s redder than ever, and bluer than ever, but not much in between.

Obama’s caution and dignified self-regard, however worthy as a way of carrying himself in public, made him precisely the wrong character to deal with the denizens of the Congressional Casbah.

He wasn’t much of a serious legislator during his relatively brief time in the Illinois state legislature ― the place bored him. He was a stone skipping across the lake during his four years in the U.S. Senate. More important, he was no fan of ― and not good at ― the naked horse trading of deal-making. He was closer in spirit to Woodrow Wilson, professor and teacher, than he was to, say, Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman.

From literally the first minute of his presidency, Republicans and conservatives declared their intent to stick fistfuls of spokes into the wheels of the Obama presidency. The proud Obama tried his hand at deal-making with them; they flatly refused. Worse, they were contemptuous and dismissive ― and there is nothing that Barack Obama despises more than to be disrespected.

His response was to firebomb Congress from afar (“YOU have a drink with Mitch McConnell,” he said drily), and pressuring the only people he had the power to pressure, Democrats, via his foul-mouthed chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel. He also relied on professional Democratic arm-twisters of a Congress that was, at the start of the Obama presidency, entirely in Democratic hands.

Everything from the stimulus package to Obamacare was passed on straight party-line votes ― as though America ran on an English-style parliamentary system, rather than the cross-cutting give-and-take of a presidential and congressional one.

The result was the Tea Party explosion of 2010 and the diminishment of the Democratic Party ever since. He leaves behind a party weak, divided and confused at the end of his presidency. But he never really cared about the party. He was above all that.

Obamacare has by some measures been a great success. If you spend a lot of money expanding Medicaid and offering subsidies for insurance, you are going to add a lot of people to the health care rolls. But the tax hikes to pay for it all are only now being fully phased in ― that was on purpose ― and Obama has set it up so that Republicans will have to cut benefits or agree to those hikes.

It was a clever, technocratic and political strategy, sold inside the Beltway by a new wave of policy nerds who could follow Obama’s strange mix of GOP theory (marketplaces) and LBJ-style government “progrums.” But the final result ignored two things: the GOP’s willingness to cut benefits and their furious opposition to any new taxes.

Since he was relying solely on Democrats anyway, perhaps Obama should have tried to sell a more sweeping reform, as suggested by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Perhaps he should have landed with both feet on the banks after bailing them out

Probably yes, but that was never who Obama was. He didn’t want to risk losing it all on any one hand of poker. His dignity had to remain intact. And to the extent he was an ideologue at all, it wasn’t on policy matters such as these. In fact, he wasn’t a hell-for-leather progressive at all; he cared less about ideas (though he was one of the most intellectually adept presidents ever). He cared about winning, and in the end, he won far less than he thought we would.

That’s why his presidency has the feel of the end of an era ― the era of relatively accommodating, market-oriented Clintonism that took over the Democratic Party in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s election after the Ronald Reagan years.

Obama said he admired Reagan, but his presidency looks a lot more like that of George H.W. Bush who, in one of those cinematic symmetries of history, lies ill in a Houston hospital bed.

Some kind of movement of the 99 percent is going to follow Obama now, and Obama won’t be leading it.

The End Of The Road

In his final speech and press conference, he said that he is depending on a rising generation of Americans ― more tolerant, more varied in background ― to carry America to the next step in social and economic progress.

But in the meantime he is leaving behind in the White House a man who has taken Obama’s own personal/personality approach to politics and tripled down on it in a dangerous way.

Donald Trump’s approach to politics makes Obama’s seem modest in both senses of the word. Trump doesn’t need a Shep Fairey poster; he has buildings everywhere with his name emblazoned on them, and a Twitter stream that never stops. He doesn’t need professorial rationality; he has the big brag.

Had he been able to run for a third term, Obama said, he would have won ― a highly debatable notion, but one that springs from his massive self-confidence.

Calm and collected to the end, Obama talked like a wise dad at his last press conference. He said he told his daughters not to fret about Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton last fall. “The only thing that’s the end of the world is the end of the world,” he told them.

“We’re going to be OK,” he assured America and the world.

The somber, almost world-weary man I saw on the stage in the White House press room, now looking older than his years, was a far cry from the meteor I saw flash across the Senate sky 12 years earlier.

But it was good to see Barack Obama finish the job as he had begun: as a class act, on a stage that he owned, with a story about himself that was worth telling.

#barack obama #u.s. news #u.s. presidential elections #republican politics #senate

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inhandnetworks-blog · 7 years ago

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Can Obama Manage Liberal Backlash Over Budget?

www.inhandnetworks.com

Has President Obama, the man who made even the dourest of liberals smile in 2008, finally made the left not just grouchy but downright angry? And will it come back to bite his party in the midterms this fall? Leading liberals in the blogosphere, the labor movement, and the think tanks say it might.

It's not hard to understand the psychology. Imagine you are a 60-year-old lefty. You came of age in the late 1960s, rallying for peace and a more just society. The story of your adulthood has been one of persistent societal decline. First Richard Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, then Newt Gingrich, then George W. Bush seized the country, ground progress to a halt, and often reversed it. Elect a truly liberal president, an intellectual, multiracial former urban community organizer, say, with a strong electoral mandate and large congressional majorities, and our Treasury should be filled with the taxes of hedge-fund managers. The EPA should be doing a brisk business selling carbon credits in no time.

The hopes that you would have laid on Obama were thus extraordinary, stoked by the grandiose conjecture of political pundits that Obama's election may signal a Rooseveltian or Reaganite paradigm shift in the polity. Obama's moderation, from choosing a centrist, bipartisan cabinet, to choosing a hawkish path on Afghanistan, quickly brought liberals down to a grumpy reality. But they set about supporting the president's plans for economic stimulus and health-care reform, and trained their ire at Republicans who threatened to filibuster at unprecedented levels and Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson who extracted enormous compromises from the White House.

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But with Obama's announcement in his State of the Union address, delineated in his budget released Feb. 1, that he wants to freeze domestic discretionary spending for three years, he may have finally caused his base to lose its patience. Liberal activists say the Democratic Party may suffer if their base stays home or simply refuses to engage in the grassroots donating and volunteering that helped propel Obama into office.

"This doesn't signal anything that is going to fire anybody's imagination," says Robert Kuttner, coeditor of The American Prospect magazine and a senior fellow at the Demos think tank. "It's one thing to do small-bore stuff in 1995 when Republicans have taken Congress and the economy is OK. [The spending freeze] is completely contradictory in terms of the need to have a second round of stimulus spending. The White House is not interested in spending that much money on jobs and recovery. Obama's base, all the volunteers—if you look at blog traffic and e-mail traffic among Democrats, people are just beside themselves, this is so feeble."

Indeed, former Labor secretary Robert Reich writes at Politico of the proposal: "Wall Street is delighted. But it means Main Street is in worse trouble than ever. A spending freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back ... His three-year freeze on a large portion of discretionary spending will make it impossible for him to do much of anything for the middle class that's important." And left-wing Web site Firedoglake's instant reaction was more outraged: "Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he'll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs."

Liberal activists point to the risk the Democrats run of looking inconsistent and uncertain in perilous times. "What happens when voters hear 'spending freeze,' then see Democrats working on a second much-needed stimulus?" asks Markos Moulitsas, founder of the massively popular left-leaning blog Daily Kos in an e-mail. "Voters are clearly cynical about the Democrats' ability to govern, and political stunts like this one won't help turn such perceptions around."

"Obama is tacking in multiple directions," concurs Kuttner. "It reads like something that was poll driven. The poll says people care about the deficit, so you do something on that. It doesn't create the impression that the president is on your side—he stands for everything and nothing."

Mainstream political and economic writers have also expressed befuddlement and irritation at the political and policy wisdom, or lack thereof, of Obama's proposal.

This comes in the midst of a developing failure to push health-care reform, a prize liberals have been eyeing since at least Harry Truman's presidency, across the finish line when it has passed both houses of Congress. As Jesse Singal argued, one group essential to Obama's coalition, young voters, may be turned off by that. Likewise, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein asked whether the Democratic base would be wise to teach their party a lesson by staying home if health care doesn't pass. Poll results released Feb. 2 showing that Democrats would do better in the midterms if they pass health care is sure to reinvigorate the exasperated clamoring from the left. (A Twitter hashtag #passthedamnbill has been gathering steam for weeks.)

The White House, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee did not respond to requests for comment.

Some of the most influential liberal leaders though, are measured in their response to the proposed spending freeze. "My difference with the president is that I think that there should be broader review," says Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). "Everything should be on the table, nonrelated to national security. We should look at the Departments of Defense and State. Twenty billion dollars per year [the projected savings from a discretionary domestic spending freeze] is symbolic but not sufficient."

And Stern adds a cautionary note for Democrats: "If we don't pass health care and have real jobs, it is hard to imagine our members—who are issue voters, not Democrats or Republicans—it's hard to imagine them feeling like the change they voted for has happened, especially in the Senate. In '94 it was almost impossible to get our members excited by that midterm."

"What happened in '94 is people sat on their hands, and unless Obama starts delivering, that's what will happen this fall," predicts Kuttner. And everyone in Washington knows what happened back then.

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dieselpunk-progressive-blog · 7 years ago

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Identity Mistakes

So yesterday saw a new identity politics screed published on The Hill’s website, written by (surprise, surprise) a former Clinton staffer. Apparently this voice from the wilderness has come to inform us that the future of the Democratic Party rests with following Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris! And why is this? What is the great visionary message these two supposed luminaries bring to guide the wayward? Well, according the author, one Michael Starr Hopkins, their single most important message is that they are young (in that weird, comparative sense of the word we reserve for politicians) and, most importantly, they have vaginas.

Hopkins analysis boils down to apologetics for the masterful failure of Clinton’s 2016 Presidential bid, pining for the “energy” the Obama campaigns and a sideways potshot or two taken at Senator Bernie Sanders and his supporters. The conclusion is, of course, that Sanders and “the left” are responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s inability to convince voters in what had, previously, been thought of as unassailable Democratic strongholds, that she would champion working class causes. Hopkins likes to blame this on “soft support from the Bernie wing”, despite the established fact that over eighty percent of Sanders’ supporters ultimately voted for Clinton, in spite of herself. One could be forgiven for wondering how better than four-out-of-five constitutes “soft support”, and what the threshold for presumable “hard support” would be.

It is in this frame that Hopkins choose to tell us that Gillibrand and Harris are the wave of the future, assuring us all that, “..the future of the Democratic Party appears to be female.” He exhorts with their supposed, relative lack of controversy! We are to be enthused by the absence of “baggage” in the form of controversial husbands! Above all, Hopkins wants us to be aware that these two conquering warrior queens, “hold no punches and have been criticized for exhibiting the same political aspirations as many of their male counterparts.”

Two which I am compelled to ask the question, “So what concrete actions have they taken to warrant our trust?” Of course by just asking about tangible policy work, I have marked myself as the enemy. But if either of these woman are going to assume the reigns of power, mantle of leadership, or whatever your metaphor of choice is, they are going to have to be able to answer some very basic, very hard-nosed questions about issues which, despite making contemporary, corporate-sponsored Democrats very uncomfortable, are nonetheless important the same voters who turned away from that Party in ’16.

By extension, of course, so must their surrogates, champions and cheerleaders. It isn’t enough to say that there is no controversy surrounding Harris, to simply proclaim that she has some mystical power to conjure up “party unity”, which is a myth in it’s own right. One thing jumps off her record immediately: why can’t she explain her failure, as State Attorney General of California, to prosecute Robert Mnuchin? Could it possibly have something to do with his support for her political career? And given the importance that Independent voters, Progressive and otherwise, have attached to financial corruption in the last several years, why on earth would Hopkins want to ignore this, and risk the rise of a new DNC leadership which is just as unpalatable to their base? Given the lack of answers to such questions from the Democrats, it’s easy to understand why so many people around the United States are exhausted with the empty promises of identity politics.

Which is not to say that identity doesn’t play an important role in the modern American body politic. But as a political strategy, deployed by the Clinton-led, Koch-funded Democratic Leadership Council, identity politics is not addressing the concrete, tangible, real-world, day-to-day lives of voters. It is absolutely true that Black Lives Matter, and those Lives need stable, reliable employment with a living wage, if they are going to care for themselves and their families. They also need reliable, accessible, and affordable healthcare. And the need advanced education, especially if we’re going to expect them contribute to society in the face of a rapidly changing, rapidly globalizing economy!

The same is true of all demographics: black, women, Latino, men, or any part of the LGBT umbrella. Yes, there absolutely are unique challenges and struggles for every demographic in our society, but the foundational issues which affect everyone, regardless of demography, have become overwhelmingly important. The simple fact is that people who don’t have a basic level of humane, economic stability in their lives do not have the luxury of time or effort to spare in championing the various struggles represented by identity. Worse yet, when people are struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, they don’t have the luxury of empathy for anyone outside their immediate tribe. If you really want a multiracial, multi-ethnic, broad spectrum social investment in the struggle for Civil Rights...you can’t have poor white families and poor black families and poor Latino families viewing each other as competition for basic subsistence!

Whence cometh this struggle? Who are the guilty parties? Start by looking at the people who abandoned economic justice for corporate campaign money after the DNC got its teeth kicked in by Ronnie Ray-gun in 1980. Then look to the ones who’ve been propagating this transfer of national prosperity into corporate hands. The Clintons tore down Glass-Steagall, and Harris has taken money from those who profited by that act. These facts are known by many, freely available to all and cannot be buried or papered over by the mainstream, corporate media. not that anyone should suggest that a paid agent of the current political establishment would use their voice in television and print media to try and unring the bell...

The point, however, is that trying to motivate voters by demographic appeals has been demonstrated to be a weak strategy in the current climate. While there will always be hyper-tribalists, the majority of Americans aren’t going to vote for a candidate because they share a few demographic traits. If that were the case, Congress would be an enormously more diverse place than it is, along line of not only sex and ethnicity, but also personal wealth. Almost everyone in Congress is a millionaire; almost nobody in the general population is a millionaire. Clearly, the idea that demographics are destiny is deeply flawed, at best. If the DNC truly wants to mobilize voters and regain their broken crown, they are going to have to take the path away from identity politics, and start cutting a new path through the thickets of economic justice and financial reform. It is going to be hard, it is going to be painful and it is going to taking hard stands against entrenched, wealthy interests. But in the end, it will work. We know this because it has worked in the past. The most unarguably successful President of the last hundred years was an economic populist. Franklin Roosevelt one four terms, a feat unequalled before or since. And he was a Democrat. Running on a “leftist” platform. He was a wealthy, white, male, college educated member of the upper class...and he understood that if the economy doesn’t work for everybody, then the long-term trajectory of politics will be towards despotism.

We are seeing this, now, in real-time. The Trump Presidency, as abhorrent as it has been so-far, is only a prelude. If the cause of economic justice is not taken up by the Democrats, then it will be taken up by someone else. And they will motivated more by anger and revenge than any idea of measured and carefully deliberated justice. These are the proverbial torches and pitchforks, and they are going to happen. Hell, they’re happening already. Occupy Wall Street was merely a prelude, the opening movement in this is Charlottesville. All those angry white men didn’t show up because they loved Bobby Lee, they showed up because they feel alienated and excluded from the national interest, both economically and politically. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this material.

People tend to forget, but the Nazis in Germany were elected. They were elected by people who felt alienated, powerless and hopeless. The global economy (which was starting to reemerge after WWI) was crumbling around them thanks to a crash which started in the American Stock Exchange (sound familiar?) and the Nazis capitalized on that anger.

The point, of course, is not that angry white men should be given special attention. It is that when it comes to kitchen table issues, it doesn’t matter what your race, sex, gender or ethnicity are. What matters is whether or not you feel confident that you’ll be able to feed, clothe and house your children.

#politics #democrats #economy #identity #justice #black lives matter #demographics

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